days of the Empire there was not, so far as we know, even a village.
Invaders came, the Adriatic littoral was wrecked; its salvage is to be
found among the islands of the lagoons. Aquileia went up in flames, the
cities of the Paduan delta trembled before the hordes of savage Huns, but
the islands of its coast held out a hope of safety. What in those days
these camps of refuge must have been can be inferred from the islands
which now border the mainland, low, marshy, overgrown by thickets, and
fringed by reeds; they were unhealthy, but only accessible by intricate
and difficult channels, and with little to tempt the spoiler. It was
better to risk fever in the lagoons than to be murdered or driven off into
slavery on the mainland. It was some time before Venice took the lead
among these scattered settlements. It became the center of government in
the year 810, but it was well-nigh two centuries before the Venetian State
attained to any real eminence. Towards this, the first and perhaps the
most important step was crushing the Istrian and Dalmatian pirates. This
enabled the Republic to become a great "Adriatic and Oriental Company,"
and to get into their hands the carrying trade to the East. The men of
Venice were both brave and shrewd, something like our Elizabethan
forefathers, mighty on sea and land, but men of understanding also in the
arts of peace. She did battle with Genoa for commercial supremacy, with
the Turk for existence. She was too strong for the former, but the latter
at last wore her out, and Lepanto was one of her latest and least fruitful
triumphs. Still, it was not till the end of the sixteenth century that a
watchful eye could detect the symptoms of senile decay. Then Venice
tottered gradually to its grave. Its slow disintegration occupied more
than a century and a half; but the French Revolution indirectly caused the
collapse of Venice, for its last doge abdicated, and the city was occupied
by Napoleon in 1797. After his downfall Venetia was handed over to
Austria, and found in the Hapsburg a harsh and unsympathetic master. It
made a vain struggle for freedom in 1848, but was at last ceded to Italy
after the Austro-Prussian war in 1866.
The city is built upon a group of islands; its houses are founded on
piles, for there is no really solid ground. How far the present canals
correspond with the original channels between small islands, how far they
are artificial, it is difficult to say; but whether the original islets
were few or many, there can be no doubt that they were formerly divided by
the largest, or the Grand Canal, the _Rio Alto_ or Deep Stream. This takes
an S-like course, and parts the city roughly into two halves. The side
canals, which are very numerous, for the town is said to occupy one
hundred and fourteen islands, are seldom wider, often rather narrower than
a by-street in the City of London. In Venice, as has often been remarked,
not a cart or a carriage, not even a coster's donkey-cart, can be used.
Streets enough there are, but they are narrow and twisting, very like the
courts in the heart of London. The carriage, the cab, and the omnibus are
replaced by the gondolas. These it is needless to describe, for who does
not know them? One consequence of this substitution of canals for streets
is that the youthful Venetian takes to the water like a young duck to a
pond, and does not stand much on ceremony, in the matter of taking off
his clothes. Turn into a side canal on a summer's day, and one may see the
younger members of a family all bathing from their own doorstep, the
smallest one, perhaps, to prevent accidents, being tied by a cord to a
convenient ring; nay, sometimes as we are wandering through one of the
narrow _calle_ (alleys) we hear a soft patter of feet, something damp
brushes past, and a little Venetian lad, lithe and black-eyed,
bare-legged, bare-backed, and all but bare-breeched, shoots past as he
makes a short cut to his clothes across a block of buildings, round which
he cannot yet manage to swim.
In such a city as Venice it is hard to praise one view above another.
There is the noble sweep of the Grand Canal, with its palaces; there are
many groups of buildings on a less imposing scale, but yet more
picturesque, on the smaller canals, often almost every turn brings some
fresh surprise; but there are two views which always rise up in my mind
before all others whenever my thoughts turn to Venice, more especially as
it used to be. One is the view of the façade of San Marco from the Piazza.
I shall make no apology for quoting words which describe more perfectly
than my powers permit the impressions awakened by this dream-like
architectural conception. "Beyond those troops of ordered arches there
rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have
opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away: a multitude
of pillars and white domes clustered into a long, low pyramid of colored
light, a treasure-heap, as it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and
mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled
with fair mosaic and beset with sculptures of alabaster, clear as amber
and delicate as ivory; sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves
and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering
among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds
and plumes, and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptered
and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their
features indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the
leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it
faded back among the branches of Eden when first its gates were
angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set
pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green
serpentine, spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and
half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, 'their bluest veins to kiss,'
the shadow as it steals back from them revealing line after line of azure
undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand: their capitals rich
with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of
acanthus and vine, and mystical signs all beginning and ending in the
Cross: and above them in the broad archivolts a continuous chain of
language and of life, angels and the signs of heaven and the labors of
men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above them another
range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet
flowers, a confusion of delight, among which the breasts of the Greek
horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St.
Mark's lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as
if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss
themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured
spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before
they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst."[4]
This is San Marco as it was. Eight centuries had harmed it little; they
had but touched the building with a gentle hand and had mellowed its tints
into tender harmony; now its new masters, cruel in their kindness, have
restored the mosaics and scraped the marbles; now raw blotches and patches
of crude color glare out in violent contrast with those parts which, owing
to the intricacy of the carved work, or some other reason, it has been
found impossible to touch. To look at St. Mark's now is like listening to
some symphony by a master of harmony which is played on instruments all
out of tune.
Photographs, pictures, illustrations of all kinds, have made St. Mark's so
familiar to all the world that it is needless to attempt to give any
description of its details.
It may suffice to say that the cathedral stands on the site of a smaller
and older building, in which the relics of St. Mark, the tutelary saint of
Venice, had been already enshrined. The present structure was begun about
the year 976, and occupied very nearly a century in building. But it is
adorned with the spoils of many a classic structure: with columns and
slabs of marble and of porphyry and of serpentine, which were hewn from
quarries in Greece and Syria, in Egypt and Libya, by the hands of Roman
slaves, and decked the palaces and the baths, the temples and the theaters
of Roman cities.
The inside of St. Mark's is not less strange and impressive, but hardly so
attractive as the exterior. It is plain in outline and almost heavy in
design, a Greek cross in plan, with a vaulted dome above the center and
each arm. Much as the exterior of St. Mark's owes to marble, porphyry,
and mosaic, it would be beautiful if constructed only of grey limestone.
This could hardly be said of the interior: take away the choice stones
from columns and dado and pavement, strip away the crust of mosaic, those
richly robed figures on ground of gold, from wall and from vault (for the
whole interior is veneered with marbles or mosaics), and only a rather
dark, massive building would remain, which would seem rather lower and
rather smaller than one had been led to expect.
The other view in Venice which seems to combine best its peculiar
character with its picturesque beauty may be obtained at a very short
distance from St. Mark's. Leave the façade of which we have just spoken,
the three great masts, with their richly ornamented sockets of bronze,
from which, in the proud days of Venice, floated the banners of Candia,
Cyprus, and the Morea; turn from the Piazza into the Piazzetta; leave on
the one hand the huge Campanile, more huge than beautiful (if one may
venture to whisper a criticism), on the other the sumptuous portico of the
Ducal Palace; pass on beneath the imposing façade of the palace itself,
with its grand colonnade; on between the famous columns, brought more than
seven centuries since from some Syrian ruins, which bear the lion of St.
Mark and the statue of St. Theodore, the other patron of the Republic; and
then, standing on the Molo at the head of the Riva degli Schiavoni, look
around; or better still, step down into one of the gondolas which are in
waiting at the steps, and push off a few dozen yards from the land: then
look back on the façade of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, along the
busy quays of the Riva, towards the green trees of the Giardini Publici,
look up the Piazzetta, between the twin columns, to the glimpses of St.
Mark's and the towering height of the Campanile, along the façade of the
Royal Palace, with the fringe of shrubbery below contrasting pleasantly
with all these masses of masonry, up the broad entrance to the Grand
Canal, between its rows of palaces, across it to the great dome of Santa
Maria della Salute and the Dogana della Mare, with its statue of Fortune
(appropriate to the past rather than to the present) gazing out from its
seaward angle. Beyond this, yet farther away, lies the Isola San Giorgio,
a group of plain buildings only, a church, with a dome simple in outline
and a brick campanile almost without adornment, yet the one thing in
Venice, after the great group of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its
triumphs in presses itself on the mind. From this point of view Venice
rises before our eyes in its grandeur and in its simplicity, in its
patrician and its plebeian aspects, as "a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
throned on her hundred isles ... a ruler of the waters and their powers."
[Illustration]
But to leave Venice without a visit to the Grand Canal would be to leave
the city with half the tale untold. Its great historic memories are
gathered around the Piazza of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its
triumphs in peace and in war, to the deeds noble and brave, of its rulers.
But the Grand Canal is the center of its life, commercial and domestic; it
leads from its quays to its Exchange, from the Riva degli Schiavoni and
the Dogana della Mare to the Rialto. It is bordered by the palaces of the
great historic families who were the rulers and princes of Venice, who
made the State by their bravery and prudence, who destroyed it by their
jealousies and self-seeking. The Grand Canal is a genealogy of Venice,
illustrated and engraved on stone. As one glides along in a gondola,
century after century in the history of domestic architecture, from the
twelfth to the eighteenth, slowly unrolls itself before us. There are
palaces which still remain much as they were of old, but here and there
some modern structure, tasteless and ugly, has elbowed for itself a place
among them; not a few, also, have been converted into places of business,
and are emblazoned with prominent placards proclaiming the trade of their
new masters, worthy representatives of an age that is not ashamed to daub
the cliffs of the St. Gothard with the advertisements of hotels and to
paint its boulders for the benefit of vendors of chocolate!
But in the present era one must be thankful for anything that is spared by
the greed of wealth and the vulgarity of a "democracy." Much of old Venice
still remains, though little steamers splutter up and down the Grand
Canal, and ugly iron bridges span its waters, both, it must be admitted,
convenient, though hideous; still the gondolas survive; still one hears at
every corner the boatman's strange cry of warning, sometimes the only
sound except the knock of the oar that breaks the silence of the liquid
street. Every turn reveals something quaint and old-world. Now it is a
market-boat, with its wicker panniers hanging outside, loaded with fish or
piled with vegetables from one of the more distant islets; now some little
bridge, now some choice architectural fragment, a doorway, a turret, an
oriel, or a row of richly ornate windows, now a tiny piazzetta leading up
to the façade and campanile of a more than half-hidden church; now the
marble enclosure of a well. Still the water-carriers go about with buckets
of hammered copper hung at each end of a curved pole; still, though more
rarely, some quaint costume may be seen in the _calle_; still the dark
shops in the narrow passages are full of goods strange to the eye, and
bright in their season with the flowers and fruits of an Italian summer;
still the purple pigeons gather in scores at the wonted hour to be fed on
the Piazza of St. Mark, and, fearless of danger, convert the distributor
of a pennyworth of maize into a walking dovecot.
Still Venice is delightful to the eyes (unhappily not always so to the
nose in many a nook and corner) notwithstanding the pressure of poverty
and the wantonness of restorers. Perchance it may revive and yet see
better days (its commerce is said to have increased since 1866); but if
so, unless a change comes over the spirit of the age, the result will be
the more complete destruction of all that made its charm and its wonder;
so this chapter may appropriately be closed by a brief sketch of one scene
which seems in harmony with the memories of its departed greatness, a
Venetian funeral. The dead no longer rest among the living beneath the
pavement of the churches: the gondola takes the Venetian "about the
streets" to the daily business of life; it bears him away from his home to
the island cemetery. From some narrow alley, muffled by the enclosing
masonry, comes the sound of a funeral march; a procession emerges on to
the piazzetta by the water-side; the coffin is carried by long-veiled
acolytes and mourners with lighted torches, accompanied by a brass band
with clanging cymbals. A large gondola, ornamented with black and silver,
is in waiting at the nearest landing place; the band and most of the
attendants halt by the water-side; the coffin is placed in the boat, the
torches are extinguished; a wilder wail of melancholy music, a more
resonant clang of the cymbals, sounds the last farewell to home and its
pleasures and its work; the oars are dipped in the water, and another
child of Venice is taken from the city of the living to the city of the
dead.
A long line of islands completely shelters Venice from the sea, so that
the waters around its walls are very seldom ruffled into waves. The tide
also rises and falls but little, not more than two or three feet, if so
much. Thus no banks of pestiferous mud are laid bare at low water by the
ebb and flow, and yet some slight circulation is maintained in the canals,
which, were it not for this, would be as intolerable as cesspools. Small
boats can find their way over most parts of the lagoon, where in many
places a safe route has to be marked out with stakes, but for large
vessels the channels are few. A long island, Malamocco by name, intervenes
between Venice and the Adriatic, on each side of which are the chief if
not the only entrances for large ships. At its northern end is the sandy
beach of the Lido, a great resort of the Venetians, for there is good
sea-bathing. But except this, Malamocco has little to offer; there is more
interest in other parts of the lagoon. At the southern end, some fifteen
miles away, the old town of Chioggia is a favorite excursion. On the sea
side the long fringe of narrow islands, of which Malamocco is one,
protected by massive walls, forms a barrier against the waves of the
Adriatic. On the land side is the dreary fever-haunted region of the
_Laguna Morta_, like a vast fen, beyond which rise the serrate peaks of
the Alps and the broken summits of the Euganean Hills. The town itself,
the Roman Fossa Claudia, is a smaller edition of Venice, joined like it to
the mainland by a bridge. If it has fewer relics of architectural value it
has suffered less from modern changes, and has retained much more of its
old-world character.
Murano, an island or group of islands, is a tiny edition of Venice, and a
much shorter excursion, for it lies only about a mile and a half away to
the north of the city. Here is the principal seat of the workers in glass;
here are made those exquisite reproductions of old Venetian glass and of
ancient mosaic which have made the name of Salviati noted in all parts of
Europe. Here, too, is a cathedral which, though it has suffered from time,
neglect and restoration, is still a grand relic. At the eastern end there
is a beautiful apse enriched by an arcade and decorated with inlaid
marbles, but the rest of the exterior is plain. As usual in this part of
Italy (for the external splendor of St. Mark's is exceptional) all
richness of decoration is reserved for the interior. Here columns of
choice stones support the arches; there is a fine mosaic in the eastern
apse, but the glory of Murano is its floor, a superb piece of _opus
Alexandrinum_, inlaid work of marbles and porphyries, bearing date early
in the eleventh century, and richer in design than even that at St.
Mark's, for peacocks and other birds, with tracery of strange design, are
introduced into its patterns.
But there is another island beyond Murano, some half-dozen miles away from
Venice, which must not be left unvisited. It is reached by a delightful
excursion over the lagoon, among lonely islands thinly inhabited, the
garden grounds of Venice, where they are not left to run wild with rank
herbage or are covered by trees. This is Torcello, the ancient Altinum.
Here was once a town of note, the center of the district when Venice was
struggling into existence. Its houses now are few and ruinous; the ground
is half overgrown with populars and acacias and pomegranates, red in
summer-time with scarlet flowers. But it possesses two churches which,
though small in size are almost unique in their interest, the duomo,
dedicated to St. Mary, and the church of Sta. Fosca. They stand side by
side, and are linked together by a small cloister. The former is a plain
basilica which retains its ancient plan and arrangement almost intact. At
one end is an octagonal baptistry, which, instead of being separated from
the cathedral by an _atrium_ or court, is only divided from it by a
passage. The exterior of the cathedral is plain; the interior is not much
more ornate. Ancient columns, with quaintly carved capitals supporting
stilted semicircular arches, divide the aisles from the nave. Each of
these has an apsidal termination. The high altar stands in the center of
the middle one, and behind it, against the wall, the marble throne of the
bishop is set up on high, and is approached by a long flight of marble
steps. On each side, filling up the remainder of the curve, six rows of
steps rise up like the seats of an amphitheater, the places of the
attendant priests. The chancel, true to its name, is formed by enclosing a
part of the nave with a low stone wall and railing. Opinions differ as to
the date of this cathedral. According to Fergusson it was erected early in
the eleventh century, but it stands on the site of one quite four
centuries older, and reproduces the arrangement of its predecessor if it
does not actually incorporate portions of it. Certainly the columns and
capitals in the nave belong, as a rule, to an earlier building. Indeed,
they have probably done duty more than once, and at least some of them
were sculptured before the name of Attila had been heard of in the delta
of the North Italian rivers.
The adjoining church of Sta. Fosca is hardly less interesting. An
octagonal case, with apses at the eastern end, supports a circular drum,
which is covered by a low conical roof, and a cloister or corridor
surrounds the greater part of the church. This adds much to the beauty of
the design, the idea, as Fergusson remarks, being evidently borrowed from
the circular colonnades of the Roman temples. He also justly praises the
beauty of the interior. In this church also, which in its present
condition is not so old as the cathedral, the materials of a much older
building or buildings have been employed. But over these details or the
mosaics in the cathedral we must not linger, and must only pause to
mention the curious stone chair in the adjacent court which bears the name
of the throne of Attila; perhaps, like the chair of the Dukes of
Corinthia, it was the ancient seat of the chief magistrate of the island.
XI
ALEXANDRIA
The bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta--Peculiar shape of the
city--Strange and varied picture of Alexandrian street life--The Place
Mehemet Ali--Glorious panorama from the Cairo citadel--Pompey's
Pillar--The Battle of the Nile--Discovery of the famous inscribed
stone at Rosetta--Port Said and the Suez Canal.
It is with a keen sense of disappointment that the traveller first sights
the monotonous and dreary-looking Egyptian sea-board. The low ridges of
desolate sandhills, occasionally broken by equally unattractive lagunes,
form a melancholy contrast to the beautiful scenery of the North African
littoral farther west, which delighted his eyes a short time before, while
skirting the Algerian coast. What a change from the thickly-wooded hills
gently sloping upwards from the water's edge to the lower ridges of the
Atlas range, whose snow-clad peaks stand out clear in the brilliant
atmosphere, the landscape diversified with cornfields and olive groves,
and thickly studded with white farmhouses, looking in the distance but
white specks, and glittering like diamonds under the glowing rays of the
sun. Now, instead of all this warmth of color and variety of outline, one
is confronted by the bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta.
If the expectant traveller is so disenchanted with his first view of
Egypt from the sea, still greater is his disappointment as the ship
approaches the harbor. This bustling and painfully modern-looking
town--the city of the great Alexander, and the gate of that land of
oriental romance and fascinating association--might, but for an occasional
palm-tree or minaret standing out among the mass of European buildings, be
mistaken for some flourishing European port, say a Marseilles or Havre
plumped down on the Egyptian plain.
But though we must not look for picturesque scenery and romantic
surroundings in this thriving port, there is yet much to interest the
antiquarian and the "intelligent tourist" in this classic district. The
Delta sea-board was for centuries the battle-ground of the Greek and Roman
Empires, and the country between Alexandria and Port Said is strewed with
historic sites.
Alexandria itself, though a much Europeanized and a hybrid sort of city,
is not without interest. It has been rather neglected by Egyptian travel
writers, and consequently by the tourist, who rarely strikes out a line
for himself. It is looked upon too much as the port of Cairo, just as
Leghorn is of Pisa and Florence, and visitors usually content themselves
with devoting to it but one day, and then rushing off by train to Cairo.